Moral Psychology and Artificial Agents (Part One)

Abstract

This is the first of two chapters introducing the moral psychology of robots and transhumanism. Evolved moral cognition and the human conceptual system has naturally embedded difficulties in coping with the new moral challenges brought on by emerging future technologies. The reviewed literature outlines our contemporary understanding based on evolutionary psychology of humans as cognitive organisms. The authors then give a skeletal outline of moral psychology. These fields together suggest that there are many innate and cultural mechanisms which influence how we understand technology and have blind spots in recognizing the moral issues related to them. They discuss human tool use and cognitive categories and show how tools have shaped our evolution. The first part closes by introducing a new concept: the new ontological category (NOC i.e. robots and AI), which did not exist in our evolution. They explain how the NOC is fundamentally confounding for our moral cognitive machinery. In part two, they apply the background provided here on recent empirical studies in the moral psychology of robotics and transhumanism.